“I just know that Squat Prom is the event of this semester and I was super saddened that it wasn’t gonna happen, especially under my time as president,” said Grace Litzenberger, a fourth-year nursing student and the president of the Backcountry Squatters at the University of Maine. The Squatters are an all-women’s outdoor group affiliated with UMaine. Typically, the group accrues its semester’s worth of fundraising in the one night of Squatters Prom, scheduled around late September. This year, however, Litzenberger and the other officers encountered a problem.
“Well, it didn’t happen when it was supposed to because the tenants of the usual house moved out and could not find anyone to rent it out. So me and Shannon McDonald, who’s my co-officer — the Squat Prom coordinator — went to the house one day and talked to the landlord for probably a half-hour.” Litzenberger self-described her “mafia boss persona” and the kinds of offers she made to the landlord to secure the Squat Prom venue. “I was like, ‘Alright, we’ll give you $1,000 and we’ll do all of your yardwork if you let us have this party here.’ I was really just throwing everything at him.”
The landlord did not agree to their request. “So we made flyers, we asked around campus trying to get someone to rent this house and no one did. So we couldn’t have the party there,” Litzenberger recalled from the middle of August when the bad news was really settling in. “We started going on Google Maps satellite and looking at nearby fields. We were trying to see if we could get a generator and find a field and figure out things with the Orono police or Old Town police… there was a lot of brainstorming happening.”
Because their group is affiliated with UMaine, the Squatters never had the option to host a bad-faith, bound-to-get-shut-down venue; they had to find something else that could be run by the university.
“My friend Nate, who lives on Pierce Street, has a really big back yard. The main worry is the noise ordinance in Orono that you have to be quiet at 11 p.m.,” Litzenberger explained. “So we planned the event to start at 7:30 and end right at 11. I wrote letters to all of the neighbors telling them that we’re having a party and that it’ll be done by 11 and there will be no parking on the street. [I wrote] we appreciate your flexibility and please don’t call the cops.”
The due diligence had been done by Litzenberger, McDonald and their fellow officers, who, Litzenberger emphasized, “work really well together… I’m so proud of them.” This semester, the group has been back in a swing; Litzenberger described her experience inside of the club as “coming back from a lull.” The Squatters have gone whitewater rafting, backpacking, rock climbing and summited Katahdin for the first time in Backcountry Squatters history.
“The knowledge that it wasn’t gonna happen… I don’t know,” Litzenberger thought. “I don’t know… I was saddened that it wasn’t gonna happen especially under my time as president. That just didn’t feel good. I thought it would be such a devastating loss to our social circle. So I was just brainstorming and asking around and was adamant that it was going to happen… and it did… and it’s going to.”
As the night kicked off, the event looked much like the usual Squat Prom, with signs for the club and bands peppering the stage, fencing, lighting — real official stuff. Litzenberger seemed a tad disappointed when only two and a half of the three band sets were able to finish before the party was shut down. So much goes on behind the scenes, and it can be hard for the drunk and stoned of us attending a party to realize the many strings pulled together to make a fun night happen. Regardless of a lack of community response, Litzenberger, McDonald and their fellow officers did everything they could and saved a cherished UMaine event.
